Spoon-Fed: Why almost everything we’ve been told about food is wrong

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Info learned = 5 stars. Content delivery = 3 stars, it was like wading through a textbook with a lot of explanations of studies and results, took me a long time to read. I've settled on 4 stars.

The event that prompted this change was suffering a mini stroke at the top of a mountain in his early 50s, after an energetic day of skiing in the Alps. “I went from being a sporty, fitter than average middle-aged man, to a pill-popping, depressed stroke victim with high blood pressure,” he recalls. It was a wake-up call that prompted him to reassess everything he thought he knew about healthy eating, including much of what he’d learned at medical school. Positives of tap water; Flouride is naturally occuring in tap water and has been proven to be effective in reducing tooth decay Spector describes the changes he’s made to his diet as “an evolving process”. He only eats meat about once a month, while concerns about sustainability means he only has fish occasionally, at restaurants: “I wouldn’t say I suddenly had the answer when I discovered the microbiome, but I’ve slowly been changing the habits I had when I was a smug doctor thinking that I knew everything.”As well as a desire to nurture his “inner garden”, his dietary choices are motivated by the insights he’s gained from monitoring his personal responses to different foods. This is why he eschews large amounts of pasta, rice and potatoes – not because they are inherently unhealthy, but because using a continuous glucose monitor has revealed that they produce worryingly high spikes in his blood sugar levels. This also gives some practical and useful ideas and insights into how you can do the best you can for your own nutritional health, without going into complicated label reading

Let's take a couple of examples where the book really is at its best. Spector discusses the incredibly confusing and mostly scientifically ungrounded world of pregnancy food guidelines. He notes a range of incongruous contradictions in advice: in the UK and US, for instance, pregnant women are encouraged to avoid eggs, particularly raw eggs, at all costs while in the Philippines, meanwhile, they are actively encouraged to eat them. Similarly in Japan women eat sushi while raw fish is frowned upon elsewhere. Such examples, at a basic level, encourage a scepticism in the reader at blanket, dogmatic guidelines that is extremely valuable. Spector goes on to point out the things that do matter during pregnancy, notably the question of weight gain: far from being common that women gain too little weight (the 'eating for two' myth) excessive weight gain is more concerning. This leads to the conclusion that instead of focussing on a handful of foods that marginally increase the risks of already rare diseases, doctors would be better off taking a wider view of pregnant women's diet and focussing attention there. We should resist the urge to be food snobs. Cheap does not mean unhealthy and whilst fresh, unprocessed whole foods are good tinned and frozen foods are also goos The common thread running throughout is 1) The insidious influence of the food industry, 2) diversity in food (again this is not new) - rather than fadishness of demonising/deifying food groups , and

This is important, Spector explains, because chronic inflammation may increase the risk of various diseases, including type 2 diabetes, heart disease and certain cancers. It may also steer people towards laying down more body fat, which in turn then produces more inflammation. I think that what is stated in this book should be taken with a grain of salt, which could be said of a lot of nutritional advice. However, the general advice of not overeating highly processed foods, getting a varied diet, and not relying on exercise alone for weight loss is all sound advice, and there's plenty of evidence to support this. The groundbreaking new book from Tim Spector, bestselling author of The Diet Myth and creator of the COVID Symptom Study app. Probiotics or fermented foods are helpful to give our gut community a regular exposure ti live microbes - eating good-quality cheese, consuming natural full-fat yoghurt regularly is good for most people. More concentrated doses of multiple microbes are fermented milk like kefir, kombucha or sauerkraut/kimchiThis also gives some practical and useful ideas and insights into how you can do the best you can for your own nutritional health, without going into complicated label reading, how calorie counting isn't very useful and how to start protecting yourself from the aggressive marketing tactics. Sometimes you read a book to learn more; sometimes to confirm that you are up to date and sometimes to reaffirm that it is legitimate to be confused about that specific field. This is that book. Because I am somewhat obsessed with the subject of nutrition, much of the material in this book was not a huge surprise to me - although still interesting to read about in detail and from the point of view of a scientist and medical researcher. The contents may be an absolute revelation to readers who are not so devoted to reading up on this subject. I have long resisted what I think of the ‘faddy’ belief systems and it turns out that if you eat moderately of a wide variety of minimally processed whole foods you are probably going to be okay. All of our modern research basically confirms that traditional eating habits were fine all along. Butter, lard, pasta, cow’s milk, coffee: all of them fine in moderation.